She used to lie in bed at night, a 10-year-old kid imagining that one day she’d be a movie star. Though she never quite got the role–getting just close enough to feel the heat of the kliegs–the Mary Carol Reilly bio-pic is epic.

“The dreams helped me get to sleep,” said Reilly, a native Baltimorean whose family was riddled with alcoholism, mental illness, condescending haves, and subservient have-nots.

She became a novice with the Sisters of St. Cyril and Methodius in Pennsylvania and a Romper Room lady in Chicago. Nationwide, Reilly hammed it up in commercials with the Pillsbury Doughboy, the young Jodie Foster in a spot for detergent, and Mrs. Olsen of Folgers instant coffee fame.

She even met America’s first couple of 1972–Archie and Edith Bunker–during a brief walk-on spot on the All in the Family spin-off, Maude.

She taught school in China, helped with post-Katrina relief in New Orleans, rebelled against Vatican doctrine by gently informing her class of Catholic seventh graders that good people of different sexual orientation are everywhere, maybe even behind the desk at the front of the room.

And then there was the time she was held-up at gunpoint, playing late-night poker with a bunch of high-rollers in Baltimore’s Greektown neighborhood.

“I was the only woman in the room, and they told everyone to drop their pants,” said Reilly. “I told them they’d have to kill me first.”

Now trudging toward 40 years of sobriety, Reilly wasn’t always so tough.

During one of Los Angeles’ darker epochs, when the colors of psychedelia drained into a single, blood-red hue–she got tossed out of the Manson trial for sobbing too loud and too long during the gruesome testimony of Linda Kasabian.

“I had more nerve than sense back then,” said Reilly, who grew up walking distance from Pimlico Race Course in the early ’50s and often snuck in to see the horses. Now nearing 70, she looks back on her escapades as a Southern California 20-something and marvels at how easy it all seemed.

“I literally drove across the country, turned right on Hollywood Boulevard and found my sweet furnished apartment at 1738 Winona Terrace,” she said. “My first real job before I was ‘discovered’ was at Norm’s Restaurant at Sunset and Vermont. Their specialty was steak and eggs for $1.99.

“Of course I told everyone I was an actress and wouldn’t be working there very long. They’d heard those delusions of grandeur before and told me to just serve the food. Every other waitress and busboy was waiting for their big break.”

But success broke for the irrepressible Reilly. Just weeks into her waitressing career she was introduced to Herb Tannen–now a fine artist in Malibu–and booked the first three gigs the agent sent her out for. Her round and freckled face played the camera like a kid playing tag in the backyard: fresh, happy, innocent, and eager.

Mary Carol wasn’t thin and she wasn’t beautiful, but she looked like the people who flew United Airlines–except she did so on-screen with beaming smile and full nun’s habit–or like someone who might need to drop a few pounds with a Carnation breakfast drink.

The worries of home–widowed, schizophrenic mother, an equally if not more disturbed younger brother, and a rusting city ravaged just a year before by riots following the King assassination–seemed one million and three thousand miles away.

“All my life, I always wanted to be somewhere else with someone else doing something else,” she said. “But when I got to California, I was home.”

Yet Reilly’s rocket ship ride would end in 1969 just as quickly as it began.

Brother Johnny, the charismatic and beloved baby of the family, had been in and out of institutions, once after threatening Reilly when he saw her hugging a black friend. Johnny was, said Reilly, confused–“emotionally hurting”–and asked her to come home.

Mary Carol demurred. She was afraid of Johnny, and she was having too much fun in L.A.

“When Johnny called, it was the height of my first month of success, and it had gone to my head,” she said. “I really believed that the little girl from Baltimore had arrived.”

Not long after Reilly turned down her brother’s request, Johnny went upstairs while his mother was watching TV and drowned himself in the bathtub. To get inside the locked bathroom, their mother, also named Mary, crawled out onto the roof from another room and climbed through a window. Johnny was 24.

It was October. In the previous months she’d lost her virginity to a guy she’d met in acting class–still unaware, at 27, that her feelings for women were more than friendship. She was on her way to scoring a baker’s dozen of national commercials and, she says, “I was laughing all the way to the bank.”

Now she had to fly home. On the porch of their mother’s Windemere Avenue cottage near Baltimore’s fabled Memorial Stadium, Mary Carol and older brother Eddie mourned their sibling with vodka. Lots of vodka.
Reilly threw up in the bushes and believes that this was the moment her alcoholism bloomed. The disease quickly took a woman eager to be anywhere but where she was to places no one wants to go.

————————————-

“No one thinks of L.A. as a taxi town but it’s big, it’s huge. I had some great days driving a taxi in Los Angeles.”-Mary Carol Reilly

In the Tinseltown where she once touched the brass ring, the granddaughter of a Baltimore harness maker held tight the reins of a Los Angeles taxi. Between fares, she took notes–in the form of letters never mailed–about the adventures that flagged her down.

There was the woman who took a cab to surprise her boyfriend out in Marina del Rey, and Reilly prayed the guy wouldn’t be with someone else when they arrived. (He wasn’t.) The rough-looking but perfectly behaved men who wanted to be dropped off in an alley in East L.A. whom she refused, saying, “I don’t do alleys.”

And the 20-something party boys on the town in West Hollywood whose banter was a non-stop discussion of getting women drunk that night so they could take turns.

“People think the driver is invisible,” said Reilly. “I told them they had to get out of the cab for being so disrespectful to women. When I turned around to put them out they were like, ‘Oh my God, it’s a woman. And she can speak English!’”

Reilly’s brother Eddie, who’d also left Crabtown for the Golden State, got Mary Carol into the cabbie business.

“I was a white, female senior citizen,” said Reilly of her indoctrination. “Boy was I the minority in that business!”

C. Arnholdt Smith controlled three-quarters of the taxi business in L.A. before folding his scandal-ridden Yellow Cab Company via bankruptcy in 1977. In the void created when Yellow sank in red, unaffiliated drivers organized while waiting for the L.A. City Council to award new franchises.

Eddie Reilly worked cab No. 22, one of the first drivers for the still-active United Independent Taxi Co.

“Eddie and his buddies liked to call themselves the last of the cowboys,” said Mary Carol, who was booed by fellow cabbies at the licensing test when her perfect score was announced. “The freedom is what they loved about it. After I drove that first summer, I understood that.”

So far, Reilly has had a handful of stints of driving a cab in Los Angeles, the only city where she’s done it. Each stretch–including Bell Cab along with United Independent–lasted about three months. She drove during a painful break-up over Christmas of 1985; hacked the summer of 1987; and last took a spin through the Thomas Guide in 2006.

“I liked going out at night after the sun had gone down and it was cooler,” she said. “I’d drive from 6 p.m. to 5 in the morning and get all the drunks up and down Sunset Boulevard.”

Men were better tippers than women, she said. Drunks tipped better than either although you sometimes had to clean vomit off the side of the cab when they hung their heads out the window.

Reilly’s Irish temper has always been tempered by an Irish heart, one softened since 1975 by recovery from booze. “Many times I’d be driving home about 2 or 3 in the morning and see a Latino man at the bus stop, somebody who’d just gotten off work from some restaurant,” Reilly remembered. “I’d pull over and say, ‘I’m going this way anyway, I won’t charge you.’”

If it had already been a good night of driving–say a $350 shift because it was her day to work the airport–the good deed made it even better.

————————————-

Reilly lives in Baltimore now, working as an overnight caretaker for the elderly and trying to develop new educational shows for children. She would return in an instant to Los Angeles–where she taught high school in the late ’70s and worked as a census taker in 2000–if the gig was right. Her last commercial work was in the 1980s.

“When I retired from teaching in 2004 I went back to L.A. to book commercial work, but I couldn’t get arrested,” she said. Following those disappointments, she drove a cab for a while in 2005. “It’s not the thrill of driving a cab, it’s just the thrill of driving,” said Reilly, who doesn’t sit still for long.

She loves taking a bus across the country (many people have to take a cross-country bus trip but who loves it?) and would hop in her Toyota compact right now to drive someone from sea-to-shining-sea for $1,000.

Asked if she would drive a cab again, the hard-core poker player’s eyes light up like sparklers-call me the tumblin’ dice … -and the answer is swift.

“I would do it in Vegas.”

Rafael Alvarez, a short story writer and creator of the Orlo and Leini stories, is author of Truth Be Told , a companion encyclopedia for The Wire.

*Photo courtesy of Neil Kremer.

The post Tinseltown Cab Fare appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The show held great promise, as much as any of the half-dozen or so I worked on before Hollywood’s writers went on strike in ’07-’08 and the Internet changed the way television is made and watched.

The pilot for the Donnellys played like a small, beautiful movie and the creators–Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco–won the best picture Oscar for Crash not long after we settled into our production offices in Santa Monica.

Once, I found myself alone in the office with Haggis and a junior member of the writing staff, a true believer in the importance of television. This was a woman who–more or less out of nowhere–would exclaim during story sessions, “How much do I LOVE this show?”

I speak my mind more than is prudent in Hollywood. My agent once scolded me–after I had called an especially inane spade a spade–and told me that producers don’t really care what I think. They only ask for opinions to be told how great they are.

Moving to checkmate me before the boss, the woman told Haggis, “Rafael hates TV.”

Bemused, Haggis looked at me with a smirk that said, “Is that so?”

“No I don’t,” I answered.

“Yes, you did,” she taunted. “You said you hated TV.”

I paused, smiled back at Haggis, and corrected her.

“I said I have contempt for television.”

————————————-

As a staff writer for The Wire–the HBO street drama filmed in my hometown of Baltimore–I was a part of television history. The show received praise usually reserved for Pulitzer-winning tomes of sagacity and sweep.

The Wire (originally broadcast from 2002 to 2008, with a huge afterlife on DVD both here and in Britain) is often called the best show in the history of television, the keystone of the medium’s second and continuing Golden Age.

So intense was passion for The Wire that the book editor of the Edinburgh Scotsman newspaper flew to Baltimore without knowing a soul in the hope that someone might show him where the real shit went down. I took this man, David Robinson, to all the places City Hall wishes the world would never see, much less associate with the Crown Jewel of the Patapsco River Drainage Basin. When the tour ended, Robinson asked if there was anything he might do to return the favor.

I asked if he could publish one of my short stories in the Scotsman. He said yes, quickly adding, “Can you make it like The Wire?” (I tried, and thus came a short story called “Rolling With the Seasons.”)

I only participated in this golden age–writing an episode in each of The Wire’s first three seasons and helping craft season two’s waterfront culture from my family’s seafaring history–from one side of the box.

Although I enjoyed my share of childhood television in the ’60s and early ’70s–The Munsters were a favorite, along with Sanford and Son–I stopped watching by the time I got my driver’s license. I often thought TV was for people too easily amused or too lazy or too stoned to do something less passive. I still do.

When my children were still in grade school, I put the set out with the trash.

They howled, “Dad, kids need TV!”

Apparently not.

The oldest, Amelia, is an actor in L.A. Her brother, Jake, is a Philadelphia cartoonist who pays the rent as a chemical engineer. And their little sister, Sofia, is a Juilliard-trained playwright in New York City.

My time in Hollywood helped pay for their college educations: NYU, the University of Delaware and Bennington, respectively.

Those years–spring 2005 through Thanksgiving 2008–were the only time I lived anywhere but Baltimore. I went from The Wire to Thief on FX (for which Andre Braugher won an Emmy) to The Black Donnellys (where my biggest thrill was naming a horse for the writer Lester Bangs) to NBC’s Life (which fired me less than 24 hours after the writer’s strike ended).

Since then, I have busied myself writing books, collecting oral histories of ordinary Baltimoreans, and then–once they pass from the world’s only reality show–writing their obituaries.

When I do get glimpses of television, it is at my parents’ house, where Mom watches all day long and sleeps with it on, while Dad relives his Depression childhood down in the basement with the History Channel.

Mom’s constant complaint is “TV is lousy,” yet she never turns it off, preferring re-runs of Little House on the Prairie and ’70s game shows to the stuff credited with gilding 21st century TV: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and–for some–The Good Wife.

She has never watched The Wire for more than five minutes, saying she can’t stand to hear that four-letter word that begins with an F. I assured her that I never put that word in any of my scripts, that I left it blank and David Simon filled it in later.

But from what I see on commercials between breaks in the NFL games I watch at my father’s house after eating pasta, our epoch is only a Golden Age if you exclude 95 percent of what is put on the air.

Dumb shows about dumb people screaming dumb things at each other; comedies that aren’t funny, only insulting; police procedurals less mysterious than a crossword puzzle; lots of nudity from people–often drunk or stupid or both–who shouldn’t take their clothes off in the shower, much less on TV; and endless stories of greed and violence.

And how many TV judges does a free society really need?

At the height of the 2008 gasoline price crisis, I pitched a show about a family who owned an independent gas station and found their meager income depended more on sales of potato chips and soda pop than on sales of fuel.

The show was called Blood for Oil, and I was told it was too earnest, too serious, too depressing. I was told, “No, thank you.”

Yet Dexter–the very successful, six-season story of a serial killer–is often praised as one of the best shows in recent years.

I would argue that we are only in a Golden Age because the river of television has been broadened–and perhaps deepened here and there–beyond anything Desi Arnaz would have recognized by the advent of cable and the Internet.

There is more gold because there is so much more trash.

————————————-

I wrote an essay for a 2009 MIT Press anthology called “Third Person,” an exploration of “vast narratives” edited by a couple of guys obsessed with The Wire.

In it, I said that the original Golden Age of television (how strange that the honorific is applied to the genre’s infancy) used literature and theater as primary sources for small-screen drama.

Way back when people still dreamed of writing the Great American Novel.

Consider an extraordinary episode of The Outer Limits from 1963 called “The Man Who Was Never Born.”

Directed by Leonard Horn, the episode was written by Anthony Lawrence, who would go on to write a TV movie about Liberace.

We see a very young and earnest Martin Landau giving a time-traveler from earth in 1963 a tour of the future, a 2148 A.D. glimpse of what remains of our great civilization.

“Come,” says Landau, human yet monstrously deformed, his face a bloom of boils and blisters created by a corrupted microbe that destroyed the human race. “I will show you all that’s left of moments, men, and places.”

And he takes the astronaut to a deserted library where the architecture is futuristic and spare, the books old and leather bound.

“Here lies the protected history of man,” says Landau. “The cherished words and pictures of all he has known and loved. The noble Hamlet; Anna Karenina putting on her gloves on a snowy evening; Gatsby in white flannels. Moby Dick and Mark Twain’s whole meandering Mississippi.”

Stung, the astronaut grabs Melville from a shelf and reads a random passage aloud. “Hope proves a man deathless.”

“There is no hope here,” says the mutant.

To which the astronaut–as though using his time machine to watch a week’s worth of TV in 2012–replies:

“There has to be …”

Rafael Alvarez, a short story writer and creator of the Orlo and Leini stories, is author of Truth Be Told, a companion encyclopedia for The Wire.

*Photo courtesy of schmilblick.

The post My Golden Ride in The Idiot Box appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

-Frank Zappa, born in Baltimore, died in Los Angeles

*

Cherry stole the Apicellas’ still-smells-like-new Ford Granada a couple hours after the bars closed on Thanksgiving. It wasn’t exactly theft. Mrs. Apicella left the keys on the seat and told the delinquent what time her husband would be stuffed with mashed potatoes and snoring like a cow. Cherry and Pete Kanaras threw their guitars in the back and aimed for Los Angeles.

So long East Baltimore.

Look out Tinseltown!

The car–milk white with a Landau roof of powder blue vinyl–was a lemon the moment it left Detroit. Instead of reporting it stolen–American flag decal on windshield, LIVE BETTER/WORK UNION bumper sticker, Maryland plates RMA 060–Mr. Apicella hit his wife so hard she cracked her head on the piano where the 12-year-old Cherry Triplett took his first formal music lessons.

“Man, Cherry,” said Kanaras, lighting a joint before they were out of the neighborhood, sticking a Johnny Winter 8-track into the ersatz wood grain of the dash. “You are too wild.”

“Wild enough to meet Frank when we get there?”

“Maybe.”

“Wild enough to try out for the Mothers?”

“Easy, superstar,” said Kanaras, passing the joint to Cherry and staring out the window as they passed the pink and orange glow above the Bethlehem Steel plant in Sparrows Point.

Both of their fathers had worked the mills at one time or another. Kanaras’ old man sat him down in high school and told him to “shit can that colored music” and start working his way up the seniority ladder like a man. Mr. Kanaras would live to see his pension gutted before he died of mesothelioma.

Cherry, who could count the times he’d been with his father on one hand, took a deep hit of the reefer and handed it back to Kanaras, who took it without looking.

“Easy does it, chief … it’s a long road from the basement to the cut-out bin.”

*

Kanaras, just on the other side of 30, had paid his dues in band vans with many a psychotic drummer and narcissistic guitar player who never made a dent in the soundtrack to the universe. Not to mention lead singers who believed themselves the natural offspring of Sinbad the Sailor and an especially good-looking Avon lady.

He had been to L.A. a handful of times before Cherry and his talent barged into his life. Kanaras had learned a few things, made a few friends and enjoyed himself.

Cherry, too cute to be a minute over 17, had never been west of Hagerstown or south of Annapolis. California was the dream–he’d seen clips on TV, just a month or two ago, when Elton John sold out Dodger Stadium two nights in a row–the Golden State a verdant bowl as yearned-for as if his name were Joad, tear-ducts caked with dust.

“You never read The Grapes of Wrath?” said Kanaras, whose education was made up of never-returned library books and earplugs. “Christ, Cherry. Lester Bangs isn’t the only guy who ever had a thought.”

Cherry threw another tape in the dash–he only relinquished the wheel after drifting into the other lane and sometimes not then–the idea of crossing state lines in the Apicellas’ new car nearly as exciting as fucking Mrs. Apicella in the middle of the day while other kids sat in class pretending they understood Steinbeck.

“Class is a pleasure when Jerome is not in it,” the nuns at Pompeii wrote to Cherry’s grandmother, the rosary-rattling mother of his never-present-long-enough-to-be-missing father.

Kanaras shepherded the Gemini capsule from turn to turn (if Cherry didn’t know McGuinn he sure wasn’t going to know Gene Clark; what the prodigy’s metal head could not fathom his fingers knew beyond thought) across the continent.

In this way, the unlikely friends (Kanaras rode shotgun because Cherry was the ticket, though Pete knew better than to say it aloud) made it from Baltimore to Bristol, Tennessee and from Bristol to Nashville, where Cherry couldn’t give a shit about the Opry but insisted they drive by the 16th Avenue Quonset Hut where Johnny Winter recorded “Second Winter,” the fabled three-sided double album in which one side of the second LP was blank, more or less like Cherry’s conscience.

Some 200 miles west of Nashville they pulled up to the Music Gates on Highway 51.

Cherry made the trip to Memphis reluctantly, even bitched about it like a pussy until Kanaras said they would either pay their proper respects or the kid could make the rest of the trip by himself.

It was 1975 and the world had not yet come to an end.

*

Two short years and a dozen cross-country trips later, Cherry sat at an upright in an empty room and played “How Great Thou Art” for the soul of Judy Apicella just a few days after her husband hit her for the last time.

Armand Apicella went to jail, and Cherry played the hymn in silence, remembering how Kanaras had to force him to touch the scarred stone wall outside of Graceland, how Judy made him fried salami and cheese on day-old bread in the afternoon, and how stupid he was.

Stupid, even innocent, if you can call a born thief who learned to play music the way Cherry did innocent.

“Frank recorded his last album at the Roxy … let’s go there first,” said Cherry over scrambled eggs and pie at Chiriaco Summit, the Granada filthy and beginning to rattle, spider cracks in the windshield from stones flying from the back of a gravel truck.

“Nope,” said Kanaras, who had no expectations beyond making it home in one piece while Cherry wanted everything, wanted it all.

“No?” said Cherry, all hopped up on Judy’s diet pills, bits of egg on his cheeks and chin. “Penguins in Bondage! Pygmy Twilight!”

“Nope,” said Kanaras, wiping his mouth with a napkin, wondering if he might toss the obnoxious goof into the desert before they made the last 150 miles. “We’re going to Babe’s & Ricky’s.”

Cherry made a face, bit the inside of his mouth so hard it bled onto his lips.

“Who the fuck are Bay-bay and Ricky?”

*

The bottom dropped out of Cherry’s mania somewhere outside of San Bernardino, and he was dead asleep when Kanaras pulled up to 5259 Central Avenue, just off of East 53rd in South L.A., the sun white at noon like a thin slice of unsalted butter.

It was Christmas Eve, and it was 65 degrees.

Pete punched Cherry in the arm–“wake up Jerry Lee”–shook out the cobwebs and went to see if anyone was inside the club at the ungodly hour of 12:20 p.m. on the day before Christmas. He peered in–all dark–and walked around to the back where Miss Laura Mae might be doing something in the kitchen.

“Wait here,” said Kanaras. “We’re gonna sleep in a bed tonight.”

Cherry leaned against the Granada–in L.A. at last–and rubbed his eyes, the smog less oxides and volatile organics than a haze of desperation shot through with false hope and calorie-heavy promises.

Clouds of petitions–novenas to the gods of lucky breaks, if you can bounce high, bounce for her too; Fitzgerald haunting used bookshops not five miles from here in search of his own pulp before his death–a drone of petitions hovering between the sunshine and the most beautiful people Cherry had ever seen.

The warmth of the sun and even the poor people taking Christmas Eve naps on the sidewalk around Babe’s and Ricky’s looked good.

(Every Christmas, Victoria Spivey used to tell Kanaras and the other white boys who grew up on lasagna and the Glimmer Twins–kids trying to soak up blues more profound than having the air conditioner in the car break down in August: “You gonna be cold and hungry when the hawk come down and the gigs dry up … best stock up on them canned goods.”)

This year, instead of laying in stores, Kanaras took a chance on a neurotic piano player who women found irresistible, scraping his knuckles against the splintered wood of Babe’s & Ricky’s back door while Cherry turned his face to the sky.

As they left Baltimore, Kanaras told him: “If you’re a four in L.A., you’re a nine in Baltimore.”

Groovy, thought Cherry, tired of waiting for Kanaras to come back to the car, but what if you’re a nine in Baltimore?

And then hopped behind the wheel and drove off because if you’re a thief in Baltimore-even if it’s an honest mistake that all of your friend’s belongings, including the way he makes his living, are in the car when you abandon him–you’re a thief in Los Angeles.

*

Cherry fiddled around with the radio. When old man Apicella sprung for the 8-track, they threw in the FM, a tub of Jerry Vale and Al Martino tapes scattered in the back, a blanket of hamburger wrappers, dirty clothes and empty beer cans over their guitars. He manipulated the knob like he worked Judy Apicella’s clitoris-“A Little Bit of Heaven, Ninety-Four Point Seven-KMET-Tweedle-Dee!“–until Neil Young’s voice warbled out of the cheap dashboard speaker.

Young had just released “Zuma”–a guitar album, big chords–and as an elliptical solo spooled and unspooled like neon suds circling a copper drain, Cherry pointed the Granada toward the ocean on the notion that he hadn’t gone all the way if he didn’t wade into the surf.

“And they built up with their bare hands,” sang Neil as Cherry found the last of Judy’s diet pills, washing them down with warm cola. “What we still can’t do today …”

It was a straight shot down Slauson from South Central to Venice Beach, about 15 miles (Cherry had a good sense of direction even if he didn’t have much sense), and Zappa–can you fucking believe it, he shouted to the palm trees–FRANK!–following Neil on the radio, the smartest asshole in rock and roll working out seven minutes of intergalactic neon of his own.

The music sounded better out here–Frank and Neil not just on the radio but in the next canyon–and Cherry followed the only prescription he’d known since birth: if one is good, six is better.

He parked the car as close to the beach as possible, thought about taking his guitar but figured he’d wait until he made some friends before breaking it out. He took off his shoes and dove into the water in his ripped jeans and pink Robin Trower t-shirt.

SWIMMING ON CHRISTMAS EVE!

He spent more than an hour in the water–“singing to an ocean, I can hear the ocean’s roar …”–his mind racing 10 times faster than his heart as Laura Mae sat Kanaras down with a bowl of chili and put him on that night’s bill.

“Help me get this raggedly-ass tree out the closet,” she said, promising the guitarist that his no-good friend would surely show up in time. “We’ll decorate it right on the stage.”

Nine hours later, just before the birth of the Messiah in a manger–“What happened to all those Johnny Winter fans?” the Mad Albino would ask one day, “Did they die?”–Kanaras played rhythm on a borrowed guitar behind Don Preston and Bunk Gardner while Cherry stumbled around Venice Beach wondering if he should report a stolen car stolen.

Round and round in his brain, the last of the diet pills missing along with everything else: “It serves me right to suffer … serves me right to be alone …”

By looking for what didn’t exist, he missed the prize twice: neither present for the past or the present; too young to have been at the Fillmore with Frank, too sick to enjoy what danced beyond his nose.

Staring at the black waves from the boardwalk, the night coming down with a chill that reminded him of home–nary a Rhonda or a Caroline in sight–Cherry cried into the darkness.

“You fucked me up Judy … you really fucked me up.”

Rafael Alvarez is a short story writer in Baltimore and Los Angeles. He is the author of the “Orlo and Leini” stories.

*Photo courtesy of chickpokipsie.

The post Just Another Band from L.A. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The jokester was the comedian Angelo Tsarouchas and the mom being made sport of–to her face, in front of the church–is a battered old woman in mourning black named Helen:

Mother Greece.

“Greece doesn’t have a debt crisis,” dead-panned Tsarouchas, dangling the bait. “Germany does …”

After all, said Tsarouchas, a Greek-Canadian, the Germans are the ones owed more than 300 billion Euros.

Ha-ha.

Very funny.

Tsarouhas came to Baltimore this summer to play the annual St. Nicholas festival in the city’s Greektown neighborhood on the far southeast side of town, just before the county line.

An early 20th-century grid of classic Crabtown rowhouses–buffed brick with white marble steps along narrow streets–the area has many restaurants, taverns and corner stores.

The enclave four miles east of downtown has long been Baltimore’s portal for immigrants. There was the turn-of-the-century surge of Germans, the landing of Polish and Italian families between the World Wars, a mild Middle Eastern influx in the 1990s, and the current wave of Hispanics. Greektown was where they became American.

My Italian grandmother landed there via Pennsylvania when the neighborhood was known as “the Hill,” and a streetcar called the Red Rocket ran laborers out Eastern Avenue to the Sparrows Point steel mills and shipyard.

It was at her sister’s boarding house that Frances Prato met one of those Bethlehem Steel mill workers, a seaman who landed in Baltimore from Galicia, Spain in 1925 as a coal tender on an English freighter.

I am that gallego’s namesake grandson and live in the house where Ralph and Frances raised their children a short two blocks from the street festival where the cheeky Tsarouchas poked fun at his own people.

“Maybe we should collect royalties on all the words we’ve given the world,” he reasoned. “That ought to be worth at least $45 billion.”

-o-

Greeks in Greece may owe, but the Greeks in Baltimore own.

Much of Baltimore’s wealth is held by a handful of Greek Americans whose parents arrived early in the 20th century to hack out a new life. Men like Peter Angelos, asbestos litigator par excellence and the considerably less successful owner of the once-great Baltimore Orioles. (The team’s decade-and-a-half long status as an American League doormat is almost universally blamed on Angelos.)

At the top of the ladder is John Paterakis, who turned his immigrant father’s bread business–H&S–into the largest privately owned bakery in the United States.

The children of such men, and their less wealthy compatriots, who may own but a single diner or a home contracting business, inevitably go on to college degrees even if they only come back to the diner to work side-by-side with their old man at the grill.

Of all the ethnic groups who have passed through “the Hill” (it wasn’t known as Greektown until the 1970s, which for years agitated some of the lingering Italians), none left their mark as indelibly as the Greeks, who continue to trickle in.

It’s the stamp of dour faces in the men-only coffeehouses where aging, old country toughs gamble at backgammon and cards on felt-covered tables. The scent of fresh basil given out each September 14 on the Feast of the Cross at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, in front of which Tsarouchas performed.

(The big man got bigger laughs with jokes about his wizened grandmother than wisecracks about Greek “accounting” practices. He later noted that the ancient Greeks defined comedy as truth plus time. With the Greek economy in an entrenched crisis, not nearly enough time has passed to make it really funny.)

And it is shared with the rest of the metropolitan area through the delicacies of calamari, dolmades and grilled-atop-an-open-flame Chesapeake Bay rockfish at a half-dozen restaurants.

Ikaros, which opened in 1969, is the oldest and best-known of the neighborhood restaurants.

“Are the Greeks responsible for their misery or is the EU responsible?” asked Ikaros’ owner and maître d’, Xenos Kohilas, whose original oil paintings line the walls. “I hear about it every day, every hour.”

Kohilas heard an earful earlier this summer when, at the request of the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association, Ikaros hosted a luncheon for a representative of the Greek embassy in Washington.

The guest-of-honor was Greece’s defense attaché, Colonel Taxiarchis Sardellis. Though Sardellis’ expertise is not economics, the debt crisis dominated conversation among some three dozen locals, many of them businessmen.

As the meal wore on, questions about the debt crisis–was the Greek government misled when they accepted loans they couldn’t pay back and how, exactly, was the money was spent?–turned toward narrow self-interest.

“People wanted to know if their land back in Greece was safe or if it was going to be taken from them,” said Jason Filippou, an official of the Greektown Community Development Corporation who attended the lunch.

One of the neighborhood’s younger leaders at 30, Filippou said being known as the world’s dead-beat–rightly or wrongly–is a colossal embarrassment to traditionally self-reliant Greeks. Photoshopped images of the German flag flying over the Acropolis, he said, are nauseating.

As is the notion that Greece is nothing more than one big Aegean swimming pool with great food for tourists from the more affluent countries of Europe.

“Being Greek is something to be proud of, that pride is instilled in you from birth, and it’s something we like to show off,” said Filippou, whose family comes from Rhodes and owns property there.

“You wake up one day and Greece is the punch-line to late night TV jokes, it pisses you off … this is a black mark on what it means to be Greek.”

There is a marked difference between Greek Americans, the ambitious, work-your-ass-off-to-make-it kids of immigrants and their laid-back counterparts back in Greece. But more so, said Filippou, is a divide between the generations of Greek Americans in Baltimore.

“My generation can’t afford to pay too much attention to what’s going on back home because we’re working to make it here,” said Filippou, who hasn’t been back to Greece in five years.

Yet Kohilas, the restaurant owner who is Filippou’s elder by several decades, a thoughtful man who has long sported the traditional, wide Greek moustache of bouzouki players, advised that paying more attention to Greece is exactly what the world needs to do.

“Whatever occurs in Greece slowly takes [concrete] form and is followed by others,” said Kohilas as another platter of braised lamb with string beans in tomato sauce left the kitchen.

“Historically, whatever happens to Greece happens to the rest of the world.”

Rafael Alvarez is a short story writer in Baltimore and Los Angeles. He is the author of the “Orlo and Leini” stories.

*Photos by Macon Street Books.

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